After the war does not come peace, but victory. Military violence in the Ukraine and social violence in France coincide in this fundamental difference. Victory defines the present much more than peace. It’s instant gratification, an exhilaration true to the aesthetics of combat. The incendiary trail of Grad rockets and burning cars, from the fires in Donbass and Nanterre, offers a captivating spectacle. Violence is beautiful, even heroic, when seen on television or encapsulated in a photo, and what is beautiful cannot be bad. Beauty justifies violence, the idea that war is a reasonable option.
The aspiration for victory keeps us in the fight, that is, in life. As long as we believe that it is within our reach, morale will not decline. That’s why persuasion is so important in this new era of security. It helps to prolong the war, to make the use of the most destructive weapons more and more tolerable.
The first act of persuasion is to identify the grievance. On him the homeland, race or social class is saved.
The common ingredient in almost any grievance is disrespect. The oppressed citizen in the cités of France can complain about the lack of subsidies and social services, that the gardens and bike lanes do not prevent drug trafficking, but what he will surely complain about is the lack of respect, the mistreatment he suffers in a police and xenophobic system that excludes him and suspects him.
Social injustice is inherent in the system, be it socialist or capitalist. It has historical roots and an economic trunk. The branches are usually psychological and almost all of us live in them.
Social injustice mobilized the yellow vests, just as it has now torched the suburbs of France.
Vladimir Putin also believes that he was a victim of social injustice as the son of a single mother in Soviet Leningrad and as a counterintelligence agent in Dresden. The collapse of the USSR forced him to destroy secret documents and survive as a taxi driver. He became poor again and on this grievance he built a messianic ideology to restore Russia to its lost greatness.
The megalomania of the invader of Ukraine has as emotional a basis as the frustration of the young man trapped in the cité. Pride and resentment condition the thinking of both.
The head of state, the supreme commander of the Russian armed forces, does not think from military logic, from the relationship between the cost and benefits of war, but from the humiliation that the collapse of the Soviet Union entailed. The invasion of Ukraine has an unbearable price in human lives, but the emotion, the yearning for victory, prevents him from seeking peace.
The Ukraine is Russia’s Vietnam and the banlieues are France’s. The descendants of Algeria and West Africa, of unresolved colonialism, aggravated even by the arrogant Francophonie, are not so far removed from the Ukrainians whose existence is denied by the Kremlin. Putin tells them that they are an invented people, that their only reason is to be the cradle of Russia.
What have presidents like Macron and Sarkozy been saying, time and time again, to young stragglers in peripheral France? That they have wasted their opportunities, that they could find a job just by crossing the street, the same street that the State will later clean with security pressure hoses.
Any military strategist knows that it is very difficult to fight on terrain that has already been fought on. The human cost is getting higher and positions hardly move. It is a great lesson from the First World War, from the Battle of Verdun, for example, where between February and December 1916 some 300,000 French and German soldiers died.
The Donbass has been a territory of combat since 2014 and the cities since the sixties. Both have become detached from reality, as happened with Verdun.
What happens there loses importance. Victory does not come and the aesthetics of combat becomes bland. General disinterest creates the fiction of appeasement. The entrenched conflict becomes invisible until a new fire ignites it: a riot in Russia, a missile against a pizzeria in Kramatorsk, a 17-year-old boy killed at a police checkpoint in Nanterre.
Then, the public roars again and victory catches its breath. There is a game and there is a war, a new fire that forces the peacemaker to interrupt his vacation in Miami. The one that stands up asking for peace is not the voice of the president, nor of the bishop, nor of the imam nor of the intellectual, but that of the footballer Kylian Mbappé, son of the periphery and captain of France.
Ethics on the sports fields, the knee on the ground of American footballers who denounced racism in the US, contrasts with the violence of a crowd that only believes in victory.
Victory, however, as Mbappé knows, is not the way out of war. It cannot be because the victor who raises his arms finds it hard to be magnanimous and the defeated who watches him has a hard time accepting defeat.
Victory stops violence against many, but it does not solve life because it is not enough by itself to achieve peace. The good news for Ukraine is that all wars end, but the bad news for the cities is that violence will be the recurring response to congenital social inequality.
